Changing your brain

 Your brain is a physical organ, and your thoughts are created with electrochemical signals from neurons along neural pathways. 

Your brain is like a computer for storing and filing all of these thoughts where ever they come from. The brain compiles all these thoughts and creates a programme off of them. Just like this laptop is programmed to tell me when I misspell a word by putting a red wiggly line underneath it, your brain is programmed to signal all manner of different things based off your programme. 

Which often is a pain and not at all helpful to us. This is when we need to go in and change the programme. Like this laptop is not always correct with its spellcheck (I double check with the dictionary sometimes and I can't figure out why the laptop is incorrect) sometimes our brain keeps signalling we are in danger when we are safe or that we are unworthy when we are not and so on. 

To understand how to change the patterns in our brain that work against us lets look at how it develops in the first place. I like to break it down into three catagories: 

1. The body
2. The emotions
3. The mind

So starting with the body this is all the physical aspects, the nervous system, digestive system, our physical senses etc. This key stage is mostly developed during the first 7 years of our lives (roughly). So quite often we may not have learned how to regulate our physical body during this key development stage the way we should have. Meaning that we aren't naturally regulating certain areas such as the nervous system which can cause a build up hormones and chemicals in the nervous system later developing as numerous different types of anxiety disorders. 

Next are the emotions that develop mostly during the next 7 years of our lives up to 14 (roughly), especially during those preteen and early teen years when emotions suddenly heighten with hormones. So we may have underdeveloped emotional regulation if we were not taught efficiently during this stage of our lives. This effectively can be the cause of numerous different types of mood disorders.

Lastly is the mind developing during the next 7 years again up to 21 years, this is how we intellectualise everything around us and ourselves. The identities we create and the stories we decide to believe in. This is when how we think becomes a pattern for who we are and what we believe. I don't think I personally know of any culture teaching people how to think for themselves, instead it seems we are all taught to follow what someone else says and never question it (something we were extremely good at as younger children). We are brought up in a society that teaches us to prioritise the wrong things then shame us for doing so. We are taught to put others before ourselves which is backwards because how can you give to others when you don't have anything for yourself? So pretty much all of us have ideas that work against us. 

It's important to note here that these three things all develop continuously at all ages (except perhaps really early ages I doubt a 6 month old baby will be thinking "oh you know what I really don't believe in Jesus actually"). But there are distinct development shifts at these three different stages. For example a 5 year old girl will be learning from the environment all around her what being a girl is, which in England would be very different to an aboriginal tribe of Africa, but by 15 years old that little girl will start to actually identify her role in the world as the girl she is, and this will continue to develop up to around 21. This does not mean however that the development ends at 21 we are all constantly evolving as people (or should be I swear some people just stay stuck in bitchy school mode forever though). But what it means is that the brain has developed fully into an adult and learning past that now requires unlearning a lot of old beliefs. For example this girl could have learnt to be of worth in this world she must be beautiful and skinny, but as an adult she realises that this is stupid and unhealthy but still has to unlearn the belief to truly feel her worthiness as a girl regardless of how she looks or what size she is.

I myself am still trying to learn that my hair length does not effect my beauty or worthiness, because somewhere subliminally I learned that pretty girls always have long hair, and around 15 onwards my hair became a huge part of my identity, I became known for constantly changing my hair colour and I was obsessed with those my space scene queens that I believed were really popular and loved, and to be popular and loved I needed my hair to look just like theirs. Now I have to regularly shave it off due to Alopecia flair ups, I no longer have that emo fringe to hide behind or frame my face!

Lets get into the sciencey bit of this!

Neurons are what science calls the transmitters and receivers of information in the brain (this is how everything functions in your body, emotions and thoughts) and neural pathways are what is giving this information we send in our brain. These are what are physically formed in the brain as patterns, from the very first thought of something, your brain attaches meaning to it. This is why the longer you have had a thought the harder it is to unlearn that pattern (or the meaning you have attached to it). 

Each time you have a thought the neural pathway lights up, so essentially the neural pathways are the storage of the program you have in your brain. During the first 7 years your brain is focused on developing these neural pathways for everything in the body starting  with sitting and balancing, the neural pathways are sending information to the muscles, then it moves to standing and then walking and so on. It is also developing the nervous system and how to regulate it, which is why I mention so much that in an unhealthy environment in these first 7 years will impact your ability to naturally regulate your nervous system later on in life. The same is for emotions and intellectualising.

Naturally neural pathways that have been created and used for longer become dominant/strong pathways and newer ones are lesser more fragile pathways. This is why once your brain is a fully developed adult brain i say you have to "unlearn" a lot of things, you have to break those old neural pathways and forge new ones and it is harder than when you are a child and still developing because you already have so many dominant pathways.

However the more you think of a new thought or light up a new pathway overtime it becomes a well-formed and dominant pathway, newer pathways that aren't practised often get "deleted" within 48 hours by glial cells. This means it is okay if you are trying something new whether that is learning a new skill or thinking a new way and you aren't getting it perfect strait away. The important thing is that you consistently keep practising it. 

This is very difficult if the new pathway has to override an already well formed dominant one (such as I am loved and worthy overriding and old i'm unloved thought pathway or drinking water first thing in the morning instead of a coffee habitual pathway) but it is possible, people do it all the time! 

The ability to change or create new neural pathways is actually called neuroplasticity that you can consciously use to reprogramm your brain. How long it takes is a much debated topic but one fact remains, repetition creates a dominant pathway, so it may take one person 18 days to create a new pathway and someone else 200 days as everyone is different as well as the nature of the pathway you are creating or changing in your individual brain. 

How do you actually do it? The best way is to understand your particular learning style, if you understand how your brain learns new information best it will help you in creating or changing those neural pathways easier and quicker. 

For example some people learn best by hearing, so they may listen to instructions for a skill they want to learn repeatedly whilst others learn better by vision and may watch the skill repeatedly, others through reading and writing and so will read then write out the instructions of this skill or a kinaesthetic learner may simply practise the skill physically until it sinks in.

If you are trying to learn a new way of processing emotions for example perhaps you wish to cope with your anger better; whether that is to allow yourself to express it over repressing it or simply have a healthier way of expressing it. As a visual learner you could imagine how you want to express your anger that is healthier for you such as grabbing a cushion to scream into rather than shouting at whoever may have angered you, someone who learns through hearing may listen to affirmations in their language that repeat how they now or will express their anger healthily and so on. But it is really important to remember consistency and repetition really are the key to creating and learning new pathways.

When it comes to the emotions and thoughts that are negative to you, it is also very important to remember not to try and flip things around every time it crops up, but to also accept how you feel and think in a patient and compassionate way. If you only ever push away those old feelings and thoughts and try to shove in the new ones you will be repressing and rejecting parts of yourself that possibly have never been fully processed by you. 

Example: If every time you make a mistake your first initial thought and feeling is disappointment and failure as a person, instead of forcefully pushing those thoughts and feelings aside in favour of the new neural pathways, try acknowledging those thoughts and feelings in a parental manner and then add the new neural pathway thinking and feeling you want to adopt. In this way you are processing that old neural pathway lovingly and giving new information to forge a new more positive one simultaneously.    

 This all sounds very simplified, and I do understand in real time just how difficult this really can be especially with issues like trauma response disorders and other very stressful and upsetting disorders like OCD, anxiety and depression disorders. So when you are struggling just remember, children learn best with guidance from parents and teachers, you as a person with already well-formed dominant neural pathways also deserve guidance and support. You do not ever have to re-program your brain alone. 

-Tiny Diny